Page 76 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes • You will need to look at it carefully as the articulators are described, and you will find it
useful to have a mirror and a good light placed so that you can look at the inside of your
mouth.
(i) The pharynx is a tube which begins just above the larynx. It is about 7 cm long in
women and about 8 cm in men, and at its top end it is divided into two, one part being
the back of the oral cavity and the other being the beginning of the way through the
nasal cavity. If you look in your mirror with your mouth open, you can see the back of
the pharynx.
(ii) The soft palate or velum is seen in the diagram in a position that allows air to pass
through the nose and through the mouth. Yours is probably in that the nose. The other
important thing about the soft palate is that it is one of the articulators that can be
touched by the tongue. When we make the sounds k, g the tongue is in contact with the
lower side of the soft palate, and we call these velar consonants.
(iii) The hard palate is often called the “roof of the mouth”. You can feel its smooth curved
surface with your tongue. A consonant made with the tongue close to the hard palate is
called palatal. The sound j in ‘yes’ is palatal.
(iv) The alveolar ridge is between the top front teeth and the hard palate. You can feel its
shape with your tongue. Its surface is really much rougher than it feels, and is covered
with little ridges. You can only see these if you have a mirror small enough to go inside
vour mouth, such as those used by dentists.
(v) The lips are important in speech. They can be pressed together (when we produce the
sound p, b), brought into contact with the teeth (as in f,v), or rounded to produce the
lip-shape for vowels like u:. Sounds in which the lips are in contact with each other are
called bilabial, while those with lip-to-teeth contact are called labiodental.
The articulators described above are the main ones used in speech, but there are a few other
things to remember. Firstly, the larynx could also be described as an articularor—a very
complex and independent one. Secondly, the jaws are sometimes called articulars; certainly
we move the lower jaw a lot in speaking. But the jaws are not articulators in the same way
as the others, because they cannot themselves make contact with other articulators. Finally,
although there is practically nothing active that we can do with the nose and the nasal cavity
when speaking, they are a very important part of our equipment for making sounds (which
is sometimes called our vocal apparatus), particularly nasal consonants such as m, n. Again,
we cannot really describe the nose and the nasal cavity as articulators in the same sense as
(i) to (v) above.
• What we are doing here is looking at the different contexts and positions in which particular
sounds can occur; this is the study of the distribution of the sounds, and is of great importance
in phonology. Study of the sounds found at the beginning and end of English words has shown
that two groups of sounds with quite different patterns of distribution can be identified, and
these two groups are those of vowel and consonant. If we look at the vowel-consonant distinction
in this way, we must say that the most important different distributions. It is important to
remember that the distribution of vowels and consonants is different for each language.
We begin the study of English sounds in this course by looking at vowels, and it is necessary
to say something about vowels in general before turning to the vowels of English. We need
to know in what ways vowels differ from each other. The first matter to consider is the shape
and position of the tongue. It is usual to simplify the very complex possibilities by describing
just two things: firstly, the vertical distance between the upper surface of the tongue and the
palate and, secondly, the part of the tongue, between front and back, which is raised highest.

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